Pecans seem so much a part of southern New Mexico and the Mesilla Valley that it's hard to believe there was a time that the state's entire pecan harvest could be held in two hands.

The nuts are not native to New Mexico, though they are to northern Mexico and east Texas.

Anglo settlers in the post-Civil War years brought pecans with them, planting a few nuts as shade trees by houses, ditches and roads.

The Rio Grande Republican refuted a claim in December 1883 by a Texas paper that area Civil War veteran John Barncastle had the only pecan tree in New Mexico.

"Col. Jones of Mesilla has two of them in his front yard, Aaron Schutz planted one in his garden in this city, and Col. Rynerson has a large one in his yard," the newspaper retorted.

The oldest pecan tree in the valley is reportedly in Mesilla and dates to the early 1870s. Rynerson's tree lived into the 20th century on the Sun-News parcel on Alameda, and a tree from the same period stands south of St. Paul's Methodist Church.
Few here thought about pecans as a commercial crop. There wasn't a big market for them: they took too long to grow, needed lots of water and were hard to harvest.

The earliest recorded crop was in 1920, with 626 pounds in all of New Mexico. The state now produces on average 60 million pounds a year, according to NMSU's Extension Service.

In 1916, work finished on the Elephant Butte Dam 90 miles north of Las Cruces. The dam brought hundreds of cotton farmers to the area, and changed demographics and land ownership in the valley.

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It also made growing pecans as a large-scale crop more than just a nutty idea.

A 'soft' shell to crack

The Rio Grande Republican reported in 1915 that attempts in New Mexico to commercially grow pecans had ended in failure in part due to poor soil, inefficient watering or using the wrong kind of tree.

But researchers at the agricultural college south of Las Cruces were figuring out how to make pecans work in New Mexico.
Fabian Garcia was a member of the first graduating class of the New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, and as the director of the college's experimental station developed chile and onion varieties still grown today.

In March 1916, Garcia planted at least 16 different improved varieties of pecans west of the college on a four-acre parcel that now bears his name.

Some of those trees are still alive and producing nuts, said extension specialist Richard Heerema.

Garcia was trying to identify varieties that produced a larger, thin-shelled nut and could thrive in southern New Mexico. Many of them failed, but one of them, the Schley, is now the most common pecan grown here.

"It is possible that the pecan may not do well in all parts of the state," Garcia wrote in 1925. "But the results (here) indicate that some of the varieties, at least in the more favorable agricultural localities, may be very satisfactory."

Garcia credited Clarence P. Wilson as the first to plant a small pecan orchard of various "improved" varieties on his own ranch near Las Cruces in 1908. These were transplanted grafted trees rather than planted seeds.

Wilson was the agricultural station's editor, who earned his degree at the college with a thesis about his pecan orchard experimentation. He ultimately developed a modest 50-acre pecan orchard.

"Wilson is really the pioneer in the pecan work in this section," the college Round Up reported in 1931. "His is the largest and most comprehensive test ever run on pecans in the valley."

It was the apparent success of people like C.P. Wilson and Fabian Garcia that helped convince local farmers.

"By selecting the proper varieties, there is no reason why the fences and the roadsides of Mesilla and Rincon valleys cannot be adorned with beautiful and productive pecan trees," the paper suggested in 1923.

But most valley farmers were focused on crops like cotton and alfalfa, and even Garcia saw pecans mostly as shade providers that produced a worthy crop.

"It is quite likely that the pecan will never become as important a crop in New Mexico as in its native states, but there is no reason why trees of the better adapted varieties should not be widely planted," Garcia wrote.

Developments in mechanized harvesting in the 30s, as well as a few shaky years farming cotton may have led farmers to give pecans a second look.

By the late 1930s, more than 1,100 acres of pecans were in production, and farmers like J.W. Newberry in Fairacres, D.C. Caylor on Brown Road off Valley Drive, and Gowan Jones south of Mesilla Park were reaping a crop from the trees they'd planted a few years earlier.

They also were selling young transplants that would end up in small orchards and yards from the south valley to Hatch.
But the vast majority of New Mexico's entire pecan crop could be traced to south of Las Cruces down Highway 28 to the largest pecan orchard in the world.

Stahmann Farms

W.J. Stahmann, a buggy-maker from Wisconsin, had already found success in El Paso raising cotton and tomatoes when he and his son Deane bought almost 3,000 acres in Santo Tomas.

They cleared the bosque and planted crops including cotton, developing new varieties still in use today.

In 1932, the Stahmanns planted 30 acres of trees from Texas. Over the next few years, they bought Oscar Snow's 1,100-acre farm south of Mesilla and planted 4,000 acres of pecan trees.

It seemed the Stahmanns did everything big.

Sun-News owner-editor Wallace Perry, who profiled Deane Stahmann Sr. in 1942, said that in addition to the world's largest pecan orchard, the Stahmanns also had huge cantaloupe, cattle and cotton operations, and even raised flocks of geese.

They set up their own cotton gins and pecan processing facilities, and essentially built a small village for the 200 people who worked there all year.

Stahmann predicted his orchard would one day produce 10 million pounds of pecans. At that time, the state produced less than a few hundred thousand pounds, most of it from his orchards.

"That ten million pounds of pecans I'm figuring on is merely a guess," Stahmann told Perry. "It may turn out to be no more than five million. But the pecan market has been no more than scratched."

Today, Stahmann Farms produces that amount every year on average.

In the mid-1960s, Deane Stahmann Jr. established a 2,000-acre pecan farm in Australia, which he still operates.

Big valley

In 1945, the Sun-News proclaimed the pecan the "heir apparent" to cotton.

The Stahmanns and others used some of the first harvesting machines, including tractor-mounted pulleys that shook the nuts from the trees.

Before mechanization, pecan harvesting required either a long pole or a sure-footed tree climber to knock the nuts to the ground to be gathered by hand.

By the 1960s, hydraulically-powered shakers, sweepers and harvesters were making large-scale harvesting what it is today.
Post-war prosperity made pecans more affordable to buyers, and coupled with the predicted downturn in cotton, more farmers began getting into pecans. Pecan research continued at NMSU by researchers including Roy Nakayama.

In June 1966, local pecan farmers including Leigh Fletcher, Nelson Clayshute, Bill Ikard, Clifford Donaldson, George McKinney, and Deane Stahmann formed the Western Irrigated Pecan Growers, which continues to hold annual conventions and promote the marketing of pecans.

Christopher Schurtz is a freelance writer and historian and can be reached at cschurtz@zianet.com